[Congressional Record Volume 157, Number 149 (Thursday, October 6, 2011)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1789-E1790]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                          HONORING STEVE JOBS

                                 ______
                                 

                        HON. FORTNEY PETE STARK

                             of california

                    in the house of representatives

                       Thursday, October 6, 2011

  Mr. STARK. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to honor Steve Jobs, Apple's co-
founder, who passed away yesterday after a lengthy battle with cancer.
  In his short 56 years on this planet, Jobs fundamentally changed the 
way the world communicates, learns, transacts and gets its 
entertainment. He also managed to make technology fun and widely 
accessible.
  In the early 1980s, I had the pleasure of collaborating with this 
once-in-a-generation innovator. At the time he was just a young guy. We 
met on an airplane and got to talking about a shared interest: getting 
computers, which were then cutting-edge technology, into classrooms.
  Job's vision was for Apple to give a computer to every school in the 
country. I had been interested in projects to improve kids' computer 
literacy in a world that was becoming ever more technologically 
sophisticated. At issue was our children's lack of access to that 
technology.
  On our cross-country flight, Jobs explained that he was bumping up 
against a tax hurdle in his effort to give Apple computers to schools. 
Donating goods to a school, he found, was not viable for a business 
because they could only write off the very minimal production cost of 
the item. This limitation made it financially untenable for Apple, or 
any other manufacturer, to donate computers to schools. Somewhere over 
the Midwest, Jobs and I agreed to work together to remove this barrier.
  In the months that followed, Jobs came out to Washington and helped 
me and my staff write legislation to create a charitable deduction 
allowance for computer donations to elementary, middle and high 
schools. Senator John Danforth, a Missouri Republican, picked up the 
torch and introduced the legislation in the Senate.
  Our original bill passed the House with flying colors but died in the 
Senate. In the next Congress, Rep. Bill Archer, a Texas Republican, 
joined me in the House to champion the

[[Page E1790]]

bill that became law in 1984. Passage paved the way for the broad 
distribution of donated computers to our kids' schools.
  Critics questioned whether the donated computers would ever make it 
out of the boxes they came in because not every teacher was 
technologically minded. Others called the federal tax credit a waste of 
money. How wrong they were.
  Steve Jobs made technology accessible the world over by putting 
computers into our classrooms, our homes, and our pockets. In honoring 
his life, we must remember naysayers' initial doubts about whether 
computer technology was worth federal investment. As we consider our 
federal deficit and ways to shrink it, we must not become so rigid as 
to fail to support innovation. Had we not taken that risk decades ago, 
our educational system, our communities and our world would be a 
drastically different place.

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